Satellogic planning to achieve global coverage with live video and pictures

October 28, 2014

Yesterday we talked about Skybox, which is owned by Google and currently has two satellites, but is planning a constellation of 24. When we talked about their gif animations of the Burning Man festival, we also pointed out a YouTube video that they say is the first HD resolution video of Earth from space. More videos from Skybox can also be found here

We recently came across this interesting article about a startup, Satellogic, that is planning to launch hundreds of satellites and provide live video and regular pictures with global coverage.

We are building a constellation of satellites to image any spot on earth every few minutes.”

It won’t be as high resolution as the best images from Digital Globe, and we must remember that at any given time much of the globe is obscured by cloud cover, but global coverage with live video or pictures every few minutes is still exciting stuff!

BugSat-1 in a clean room.

The internals of a satellite.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Comments

Good! Some of us more awake now we can use these almost live images by saving screen shots to show off the global engineering attempts to modify the weather using downburst rings to kill off storms as much as they can.

My opinion to shield us from radiation from Japan by blocking storms so the radiation goes to the least populated areas in the north and to cover up Global Warming at the same time by cooling off the East Coast with the *Polar Vortex* which is showing signs of being restarted like last year.

They can try to *doctor* the pictures but it will be pretty hard if it’s even close to being live and with Republicans *as long as they aren’t the wishy washy type* should be starting to demand answers once enough people have had it.

I’m sorry Google, but does it not occur to you that live video imaging of every corner of the earth which companies like Skybox, Satellogic, etc. are trying to do is ultimately a potentially massive and unprecedented invasion of the privacy of individuals and individual entities? Whether or not the US Government or military already has such imaging systems deployed is a moot point. Supposedly private enterprises such as yourself should be the ones striving to head off such potentially egregious violations of the rights of individuals and individual entities to privacy, instead of promoting yet more and more capability toward these violations happening. As difficult as it may be for you to imagine, there is a whole world of people, businesses, organizations, communities, societies, etc. out there who do not actually live in San Francisco, and who have no desire to be involved with the world or circle of 24-hour global self-publicity and self-objectivication that you have helped create. The purported uses or applications of this technology (monitoring supply chains, humanitarian aid, etc) are processes which do not in actuality require this kind of live overhead imaging in order to run as intended, and in fact might be more greatly hampered by it than helped. Essentially, those purported “applications” are bogus and a merely a smokescreen. This is really just another step toward greater and greater potential surveillance of private individuals and small entities by wealthy and powerful entities. Such as yourself.

This blog and its author are not an official source of information from Google that produces and owns Google Earth
Google and Google Earth are trademarks of Google Inc..
All image screenshots from Google Earth are Copyright Google.
All other trademarks appearing here are the trademarks of their respective owners.